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Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D. |
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Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D.
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 Dr. Gonzalez graduated from Brown University, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with a degree in English Literature. He subsequently completed his premedical work as a postgraduate student at Columbia University and received his medical degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1983. After medical school, he completed fellowship training in immunology. He began researching nutritional approaches to cancer as a medical student and completed an investigation of the enzyme therapy of cancer while an immunology fellow.
When I graduated from Brown University in 1970 with a degree in English I had no interest whatsoever in a scientific career. My intention was to travel the world and pursue a career in journalism. I was fortunate that after college I got a job, though a beginning one, at Time Inc., working under Byron Dobell. Previously he had been managing editor of Esquire and considered to be one of the finest developers of writing talent of that era. Under his direction I began to learn how to be a journalist in the traditional, pre-Internet sense and when I began to achieve some success I thought I was very fortunate indeed.
I also had a long interest in natural history. I was raised in a family of naturalists (my brother is trained as a botanist and is a sometime organic gardener) and long thought of myself as a competent amateur ecologist. It was actually my readings in wildlife ecology that led to my interest in medicine. I was surprised to learn that wildlife biologists were long aware that the health of any animal population, from insects to elephants, depended primarily on adequate nutrients in the food chain, beginning with the soil. My study of animal nutrition led inevitably to human nutrition and the works of scientists such as Weston Price and Frances Pottenger.
As a result of my growing interest in medical research, particularly nutrition, an editor friend suggested I do articles on medical issues concentrating on prevention. A lengthy piece of mine published in 1976 on cancer prevention brought me into contact with eminent cancer researchers such as Ernst Wynder and Linus Pauling. At that point, though I was older, I decided to change careers, turn down a book contract and begin my premedical work at Columbia University. After my premedical work I decided to attend Cornell University Medical College in Manhattan because of its affiliation with Memorial-Sloan-Kettering and because the president of Sloan-Kettering at the time, Dr. Robert A. Good, was widely known to have an interest in nutrition and its relationship to cancer. He was known especially, as I learned during my first year of medical school, for having the time to talk to even the lowliest of students—something remarkable for a scientist with his responsibilities.
During the summer break after my second year of medical school I had the opportunity to meet Dr. William Donald Kelley, the Texas dentist who for 20 years had been treating cancer patients with a complicated nutritional therapy based on the work of Dr. John Beard. Dr. Beard, who had been a professor at the University of Edinburgh at the turn of the century, first proposed in 1906 that the pancreatic proteolytic enzymes represent the body’s main defense against cancer and would be useful as a cancer treatment. Dr. Kelley had taken Beard’s work and refined it extensively and though Kelley had been attacked in the press because of the unorthodox nature of his work, the Dr. Kelley I met was an unassuming man whose primary wish was to have his controversial work fairly evaluated by the academic medical world.
Dr. Good thought an informal review of Kelley’s records would be a useful student project which I pursued despite the rigors of third and fourth year medical school. Eventually what began as a student project developed into a formal research effort which I pursued while I was an immunology fellow. It was this study, completed in 1986, that led to my current research direction.
During my investigation I reviewed nearly 10,000 of Dr. Kelley’s patient records and evaluated intensively over 500 patients with appropriately diagnosed advanced cancer, many of whom had done extraordinarily well under Kelley’s care. I summarized my findings in an extended monograph completed in 1986 as partial fulfillment for my fellowship training. Despite the careful documentation and the five-year investment of time, my attempts at publication were met with scorn and ridicule. It seemed no one in academic medicine could, at the time, accept that a nutritional therapy might produce positive results with advanced cancer patients.
In 1986, probably as a result of endless pressures, Dr. Kelley gave up research and patient care and I have not spoken with him since 1987. In that year I moved to New York to try and salvage the enzyme approach and observe for myself the results with poor prognosis cancer patients. My goal throughout has been to generate research support so that this method, if it indeed proved to have value, could be integrated into general medical treatment.
In July 1993 the then associate director for the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Michael Friedman, invited me to present selected cases from my own practice as part of an NCI effort to evaluate non-traditional cancer therapies. After the session Dr. Friedman suggested I pursue a pilot study of our methods with 10 patients suffering inoperable adenocarcinoma of the pancreas, with survival as the endpoint. Because the standard survival for the disease is so poor, an effect could be seen in a small number of patients in a short period of time.\
About that time Dr. Pierre Guesry, vice president of research of Nestle and the former medical director of the Pasteur Institute, conducted a site visit and case review at my office as part of Nestle’s effort to investigate promising research in nutritional therapeutics. After the review by Dr. Guesry, Nestle agreed to fund the pilot study in full. The project began in earnest in January 1994 and was completed in January 1999. The results of the trial were published in the June 1999 issues (Volume 33, Number 2) of Nutrition and Cancer. Of 11 patients followed in the trial, eight of 11 suffered stage IV disease. Nine of 11 (81 percent) lived one year, five of 11 lived two years (45 percent), four of 11 lived three years (36 percent) and two have passed four years. In comparison, in a recent trial of the newly approved drug gemcitabine, of 126 patients with pancreatic cancer not a single patient lived longer than 19 months.
As a result of the pilot study, the National Cancer Institute, working in conjunction with the Center of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine at the NIH, approved funding for a large scale randomized clinical trial comparing my nutritional therapy against gemcitabine in the treatment of inoperable pancreatic cancer. This study has full FDA approval and is being conducted under the Department of Oncology and the Department of Surgical Oncology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. This study is up and running.
Our goal remains to have our approach properly tested in an academic environment and should the results continue to prove positive, to have our work mainstreamed into the orthodox medical world.
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